Purpose: The recurrence of banking crises throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and in the more recent 2008-09 global financial crisis, has led to an expanding empirical literature on crisis explanation and prediction. This paper provides an analytical review of proxies for and important determinants...

Rapid credit growth seems to precede many episodes of banking crises in both advanced and emerging market economies including the recent global financial crisis of 2007-09. All episodes of high credit growth are not followed by crisis, however. We argue that credit growth is more likely to lead...